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The design challenge of pervasive computing

Authors:
John Thackara

I want to tell you about a frog. I am sure you know the story
about its relationship with boiling water. If you drop a frog
into the pan when the water is boiling, it will leap out. But if
you put the frog into a pan of cold water, and then heat it
steadily towards boiling point, the frog, unaware that any
dramatic change is taking place, will just sit there and slowly
cook. The frog story, to me, is symbolic of our relationship with
technology at this time. If you could transport someone from the
year 1800 straight into a western city today, I’m pretty sure he
or she would leap straight back out in terror and shock. But we,
who live here, don’t do that. We have a vague sensation that
things seem to be getting warmer and less comfortable, but
nothing more alarming than that.

But I think the pan is about to boil. Two state changes are
happening in technology. The first is that computing is
penetrating every aspect of our livesto a degree few
people seem to realize; second, the rate of change in technology,
which was already fast, is accelerating. These state changes
define the context in which this new institute is being
createdand confront a dilemma in innovation: we can do
amazing things with technology, and we’re filling the world with
amazing systems and devices, but we find it hard to explain what
this new stuff is for, or what value it adds to our lives. I
don’t think we can evade these questions any longer. The good
news is this: I believe interaction design can help us unlock
this innovation dilemma by shifting the focus of innovation from
pure technology to the contexts of daily life.

Interaction design can help shift the focus
of innovation from pure technology to the contexts of daily
life.

First, let me draw your attention to the technological
landscape. It’s not so much that technology is changing quickly.
Change is one of the constants we have become used to. What
shocks me is the rate of acceleration of changeright now.
In daily life almost everything man-made will soon combine
hardware and software. Ubiquitous computing spreads intelligence
and connectivity to more or less everything around us. Ships,
aircraft, cars, bridges, tunnels, machines, refrigerators, door
handles, lighting fixtures, shoes, hats, packaging. You name it,
and someone, sooner or later, will put a chip in it. There’s a
microprocessor, or chip, in a bathroom scale with a digital
readout. There’s a chip in an iron that turns itself off
automatically. There’s a chip in a smoke detector that calls the
fire department. It takes 3,000 lines of computer code to drive
an electronic toothbrush, for goodness sake!

Now, for most people "computing" is what happens
inside the ugly boxes that sit on our desks. But those desk-top
boxes are old news. They are the steam engines of computing.
Today’s computing is everywherebut nowhere to be seen. The
world is already filled with 30 computer chips for every man,
woman, and child on the planet. In 1998 some 4.8 billion
microprocessors were sold; only 2.5 percent of those were for
personal computers. The other nearly 4.7 billion chips
wentwhere? They went everywhere. They’re like cockroaches.
Only smarter.

Increasingly, many of these chips sense their environment in
rudimentary but effective ways. The way things are going, as the
science fiction writer Bruce Sterling so memorably put it,
"you will go to look at the flowers in the garden, and the
garden will look at you."

But do all these chips make for better products? Or a better
life? Let me tell you a strange thing. Hardly anyone is asking
that question. When it comes to innovation, we are looking down
the wrong end of the telescope: away from people, toward
technology. Industry suffers from a kind of global autism.
Autism, as you may know, is a psychological disorder that is
characterized by "detachment from other human beings."
This autism probably explains the fiasco over third-generation
(3G) Internet. In the United Kingdom alone, the auction of radio
spectrum raised $25 billion. That’s an awful lot of money to pay
for fresh air! And what did these companies think they were
buying? They thought they were buying the latest technological
Holy Grailthe capacity to send broadband
"content" to people on their mobile phones. Did these
companies talk to people in the street, to their future
customers, about this fantasy? No. They went to Comdex and talked
to each other. Talk about the blind leading the blind. This whole
sad 3G story is an exact repetition of 1993 when everyone said
that the destiny of the Internet was to transmit Hollywood movies
into our homes.

Software bloat is the tendency, as bandwidth expands, to fill
it up with "content"just because bandwidth or
processor speeds are improving. My friend Ezio Manzini calls this
phenomenon "semiotic pollution." Just because broadband
makes it possible to send large amounts of data down the pipe, or
wirelessly, does it follow that you have to send people great
gobs of data to deliver meaningful content and rich experiences?
I don’t think so. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. When
it comes to communication service design, less is more.

There are scenarios for wirelessness in Europe other than
Hollywood in the palm of your handbut they don’t fill me
with joy, either. Ericsson and Electrolux are developing a
refrigerator that will sense when it is low on milk. Imagine the
scene. You’ll be driving home from work in your car, and the
phone will ring. "Your refrigerator is on the line,"
the car will say. "It wants you to pick up some milk on your
way home." To which my response will be "tell the
refrigerator I’m in a meeting."

Tens of billions of dollars may have been wasted on 3G
licenses, but the effects of those billions of dollars will still
be felt as the dollars gurgle down the drain. The most amazing
prediction I heard recently was that by 2010 seventy five
percent of teenagers will wear computing on their body in the
"always on" mode. My daughter, who is 11, will probably
be one of them. We are designing a world in which every object,
every buildingand nearly every human bodybecomes
part of a network service. We may not have set out to design such
an outcome, but that’s what we’re going to get. Unless things
change, we’ll achieve pervasive computing and ubiquitous
networking without having forethought the effects this will have
or the quality of life we are bequeathing our children.

I talked earlier about industrial autism, about companies
fixated on technology rather than on people. We know how to make
amazing things, technically: mobile devices, Internet traffic,
processor speeds, whatever. Our dilemma is this: we do not know
what needs these new technologies are supposed to meet. In fact,
we don’t even think about that question, the why. We’ve created
an industrial system that is brilliant on means but pretty
hopeless when it comes to ends. We can deliver amazing
performance, but we find value, and meaning, too hard to think
about.

The result is a divergence in technological complexity and
perceived value. We’re sitting uneasily between an infatuation
with technology on the one hand and unease about its actual value
to us on the other. Our unease is one consequence of what I call
Thackara’s Law: if you put smart technology into a stupid
product, the result will be a stupid product. And sooner or
later, peopleus, mewill get fed up with them.

So what are we to do? In what way might interaction design
help us resolve this innovation dilemma? Interaction design is
about the why as well as the how of our daily interactions using
computers. Interaction design creates value in three ways: first,
by designing new ways to connectwith family, friends,
lovers, and colleagues. These new ways to connect will be the
communication services of tomorrow. People are by nature social
creatures, and huge opportunities await companies that find new
ways to improve communication and community among people in their
everyday lives. Social computing, it has been called.

Second, interaction design creates value by allowing us richer
and more varied forms of interaction. Interaction design favors
all the senses and allows us the power to hear and taste and see
and touch and feel. It’s about communication that is playful,
intuitive, moving, surprising, and fun. This kind of
communication has value not found in today’s services.

Third, interaction design creates value by emphasizing service
and flow. Redesigning business according to the service-and-flow
model means we stop thinking of ourselves as being in the product
business. We become, instead, deliverers of service. These
services are carried by long-lasting, upgradable durables.
Material products become a means, not an end in themselves.

In this new design space, the real and the virtual, matter and
information, co-exist. The Spanish economist Manuel Castells
calls this space the "space of flows." This is not to
say that interaction design is immaterial. But as computing
migrates from ugly boxes on our desks and suffuses everything
around us, a new relationship is emerging between the real and
the virtual, the artificial and the natural, the mental and the
material. Interaction design improves the quality of these
in-between zones.

These are big claims for interaction design. If I am correct,
interaction design can transform the ways we innovate new
communication services, and the economic consequences of that
would be immense. But the question arises: if interaction design
is so important, what difference can a single institute, however
lively and successful, make? My answer is: a lot. I believe
Institute Ivrea will punch above its weight because of something
called the "edge effect." In biology the edge effect is
the tendency of a greater variety and density of organisms to
cluster in the boundaries between communities. As in nature, so
too in a networked economy: variety and interaction are success
factors. These success factors do not occur naturally inside
large companies, or even in small ones. On the contrary: the
tendency in most companies is for people to get stuck in
specialized boxes, where they are required to focus on a narrow
part of the picture.

But history is filled with examples of small organizations,
apparently on the edge of mainstream thinking, that influenced
the bigger picture and the many people in it. I’m thinking of the
19th-century salons of avant-garde artists and writers. I’m
thinking of the Bauhaus during the early part of the 20th
century. I’m thinking of the Santa Fe Institute in more recent
times. These small groups of people had a huge influence because
they addressed crucial issues at moments in history when culture
was ready to change. The Bauhaus unleashed modernism; it did not
create it out of thin air. The Santa Fe Institute did not invent
complexity, but put complexity science on the intellectual agenda
at a moment when the world was ready to think about it. I’m
pretty sure Institute Ivrea will benefit from the edge effect,
too. The world is ready for a new approach to innovation.

History is filled with examples of small
organizations that influenced the bigger picture and the many
people in it.

Mind you, change won’t come easily. Companies are just like
people; if you want them to change, criticizing is not the best
way to start! As with a person, a company can best learn new
skills, and new ways of thinking, by example and by association.
New examples and association with new people are what Interaction
Ivrea, at heart, will be about. It will exemplify the edge effect
by looking in new places for ideas and inspiration. Under
Director Gillian Crampton Smith’s leadership the institute will
share its expertise and knowledge in new ways, too. Collaborative
innovation is the way of the future. New ways to create, share,
and distribute design knowledge are an exciting new trend in
these times. Peer-to-peer networking, file-sharing, open-source
software, and the like are transforming the speed with and manner
in which knowledge, including design knowledge, can be
distributed.

John Thackara is director and first Perceptron of Doors of
Perception in Amsterdam. He is on the Steering Committee of
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Sidebar: Articles of Association Between Design, Technology, and The People Formerly Known As Users

Article 1
We cherish the fact that people are innately curious, playful,
and creative. We therefore suspect that technology is not going
to go away; it’s too much fun.

Article 2
We will deliver value to people, not deliver people to systems.
We will give priority to human agency and will not treat humans
as a "factor" in some bigger picture.

Article 3
We will not presume to design your experiences for you,
but we will do so with you, if asked.

Article 4
We do not believe in idiot-proof technology, because we are not
idiots and neither are you. We will use language with care and
will search for less patronizing words than "user" and
"consumer."

Article 5
We will focus on services, not on things. We will
not flood the world with pointless devices.

Article 6
We believe that "content" is something you do,
not something you are given.

Article 7
We will consider material end energy flows in all the systems we
design. We will think about the consequences of technology before
we act, not after.

Article 8
We will not pretend things are simple when they are complex. We
value the fact that by acting inside a system, you will probably
improve it.

Article 9
We believe that place matters, and we will look after it.

Article 10
We believe that speed and time matter, too, but that sometimes
you need more, and sometimes you need less. We will not fill up
all time with content.

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